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Doku Umarov, linked to two recent deadly bombings, has vowed to stop the Sochi Olympics. Could he strike the Games?

Islamist leader Doku Umarov, seen in a picture taken from ceceonline.com, has vowed to stop the Olympics “using any methods that Allah allows us.” His threats are being taken seriously. (AFP / GETTY IMAGES)

But Doku Umarov is still Russia’s public enemy number one: a man linked to two recent deadly bombings that killed some 32 people in Volgograd, a gateway to the Sochi Olympics.

And as Russian President Vladimir Putin vows to “exterminate” terrorists in the turbulent North Caucasus region that flanks Sochi, the shadow of the burly, bearded Islamist leader falls darkly over next month’s Games.

As shadowy as his image, Umarov is an elusive figure in spite of his intermittent bluster on the Internet, and his claims to be the supremo of a new Muslim “emirate” in the Caucasus. Some wonder if he is more cyber-tiger than fearsome predatory beast.

In his latest outpouring on a militant website, Umarov dubbed the Sochi Games “satanic,” and said they were being held “on the bones of our ancestors” and many other Muslims who are buried on their traditional land near the Black Sea.

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His vow to stop the Olympics “using any methods that Allah allows us” is being taken seriously. But Russia’s security ring of steel around Sochi is unlikely to quell the fear of attack in the southern resort, and as far away as Moscow.

In the past five years Umarov has claimed responsibility for suicide bombings and terrorist attacks on a busy Moscow airport, high-speed train and subway cars that left more than 100 people dead and sent shock waves through the Russian capital.

Umarov hasn’t stepped up to the Volgograd bombings. But could he strike even closer to the $50-billion Olympics that are Putin’s proudest legacy project?

“This is a test of whether he’s strong enough to mobilize the insurgency and move it a couple of hundred miles to unfamiliar territory,” says Robert Ware of Southern Illinois University Edwardsville, who has worked in the Caucasus for more than 15 years. “But my best bet is it isn’t going to happen.”

The reason, Ware says, is “he has very little weight to push around.”

Unlike deceased warlord Shamil Basayev — who planned some of the most dramatic and bloody attacks and hostage-takings in Russia’s recent history — Umarov operates at arm’s-length, and what control he has is exerted through networks of influence in the region.

“Nearly all the attacks we’ve seen have been done by local people. He hasn’t been directly involved for years,” Ware says. That has led to rumours that he’s dead, or operating from outside the country, in the Middle East or neighbouring Georgia or Azerbaijan.

But unlike other Caucasus leaders — going back to the 19th-century icon Imam Shamil — Umarov has led more by default, opportunism and connections than tactical brilliance or personal charisma.

“The guy is a fighter not a politician,” says Miriam Lanskoy, co-author (with Ilyas Akhmadov) of The Chechen Struggle. “He doesn’t have the ability to do more than one thing at a time.”

Born in the rugged, impoverished Shatoi district of Chechnya, 49-year-old Umarov claims a background in the Soviet-era “intelligentsia.” But after studying engineering in Grozny he joined hundreds of other unemployed young Chechens in the Siberian energy hub of Tyumen, where he was said to have been jailed for violent crimes.

Those claims may have been rumours to discredit Umarov. But one of his closest allies, Said Buryatsky, wrote that it was “no secret” that he was involved in racketeering before joining the Chechen resistance in the early 1990s, according to the Caucasian Review of International Affairs.END

In the event, Umarov returned to Chechnya more like a mobster than a military recruit. Buryatsky paints a picture of Umarov rolling up “in a Mercedes, with a cigarette in my mouth” to join the militia of his disapproving Islamist kinsman Khamzat Gelayev.

Umarov then had little interest in religion — brought up, like most Chechens, in the moderate Sufi faith. He worked his way into the inner circle of leader Dzhokar Dudayev, who sparked a war with Russia by declaring independence and was later killed.

Umarov fought against the Russians on the front lines, and when the war ended with a surprising Chechen victory in 1996, he joined Dudayev’s moderate successor, Aslan Maskhadov, rising to head the ragtag new government’s Security Council.

Married into the clans of two prominent field commanders, Umarov survived a second war with Russia in 1999-2000, and moved to the top of a long insurgency against Chechnya’s Russian-installed administration after Maskhadov’s assassination. But it was a narrow escape.

“Plastic surgeons were able to restore damaged portions of his skull and he has pronounced scars on his lips and chin,” said Radio Liberty reporter Andrei Babitsky, who met with Umarov in a bleak forest camp in 2005. A serious leg wound from a landmine also left him with a permanent limp.

Umarov’s near-death experiences may have nudged him toward religion. “A person without faith is not a whole person,” he told Babitsky. “We are on Allah’s path . . . so we are obligated to perform the jihad.” But, he added, labelling him a fanatical Islamist was a KGB “fantasy.” And he condemned terrorist attacks on civilians as illegitimate.

By 2007, Umarov was the last man standing in the rebel leadership, his more notorious comrades dead. He shocked followers by declaring that the breakaway “Republic of Ichkeria,” or Chechnya, no longer existed. Instead, he proclaimed a “Caucasus Emirate” stretching through Russia’s southern republics, with himself as its emir. The move won him a place among international terrorists like Al Qaeda, and a $5-million price on his head from Washington.

“He’s grown more radical over time,” says Matteo Fumagalli, a specialist in ethnic and religious conflict at the Budapest-based Central European University. “Now he’s quite a big player in Russia, but not worldwide. For lack of a more inspiring figure he rose to the top.”

Umarov did make a unique mark. He took the struggle outside Chechnya into the strife-torn Caucasus republics — Dagestan, Ingushetia, Kabardino-Balkaria — fuelling instability on Russia’s southern flank. But as the Sochi Games approach, the crucial question is: does his reach exceed his grasp?

Experts say his most likely targets for disrupting the Olympics are rail routes, bridges and power plants outside the heavily fortified Sochi area. But, says Fumagalli, “he’s begun to rely on much smaller cells (of militants) that are tricky for security to control.”

So far Umarov is the ultimate survivor. But even if he were gone, deeper problems would remain.

“The region is the symbol of the fragility of the Russian state and the fragmentation of the political order,” says Fumagalli. “Islamism, the religious tone, show that people are feeling more detached from the state — a result of the poor impact of (President Vladimir) Putin’s policies.”

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